Sociology

The relation of oneself to oneself must be understood as talking to oneself, and this in turn is to be understood as the internalization of communicative talking to others.  Thus, it is essentially both linguistically and socially conditioned.  But for Mead the reverse of this conditional relation is equally operative  only beings that can relate themselves to themselves by virtue of their capacity to talk to themselves can speak the specifically human form o language and can have the specifically human or normative form of sociality.

Mead says that it is the characteristic of the self as an object to itself.  It is reflexive and indicates that which can be both subject and object.  The human being may perceive himself, have conceptions of himself, communicate with himself and act toward himself.  The human being therefore may become the object of his own action.  This gives him the means of interacting with himself  addressing himself, responding to the address and addressing himself again.  Therefore Mead saw the self as a process and not as a structure.  

The Self in Sigmund Freuds Social Thought
Freud developed an understanding of the self based on the power exercised over the mind by drives and passions rooted in the body.  At the same time, Freud considered the other dimensions that mold self-existence.  He pinpointed the particular role of reflectivity in forming and re-forming the self.

In the course of the therapy Freud conducted he relied on holding a mirror up to the psychic interior of his patients. He made them expand the power of their desire to enlist the mind for its own hidden and devious ends.  In the latter part of Freuds career, he sought to strengthen the claims of psychoanalysis to provide a theory of normal psychology by rooting the egos ability to gain distance from the conflicts that threatened it deep inside the unconscious, where self-command could never throw off its servitude to the erotic and destructive energies form which it had to draw its power.  Freud illustrated human drama in terms of an essentially mythical struggle between cosmic instincts of life and death.

The dynamics of the concept of self by Freud were not created only by his attempt to gain a deeper insight into the role desire played in forming it, but equally by the effects of this revision on the selfs other elements, particularly on the reflectivity whose essential part in self-formation and reformation he always recognized. His was a theory of the self that gave close attention various dimensions that simultaneously assigned crucial tasks to reflectivity and heightened the power that bodily being in tension with social existence exercised over it.